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ORIGINAL: Termyn8or

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers

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ORIGINAL: Nnanji

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ORIGINAL: tamaka

Yep.... capitalism is a corrupt system because people are greedy and corrupt.

Actually, if you read anything other than your kool aid package the free market is supposed to be self interested. In being so it has raised more people out of poverty by magnitudes than any system. Now I understand that you can't seem to be competitive and resent not having a nanny state care for you, but that's not really a loss to anyone, is it?

What unmitigated bullshit.

You obviously have no clue as to the history of the corporation for just one example. The original 'conservatism' truly regulated yet still allowed a robust 'free' market.

Highlites: By 1873...the corruption was all but a done deal and thanks at the start to Marshall making the courts higher then and unequal over the rule of the people.

[There] is looming up a new and dark power...the enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests only, but for political power....The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which shall rule—wealth or man [sic]; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations, educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, Edward G. Ryan said ominously in his 1873 address to the graduating class of the University of Wisconsin Law School.

*Corporations were required to have a clear purpose, to be fulfilled but not exceeded.
*Corporations’ licenses to do business were revocable by the state legislature if they exceeded or did not fulfill their chartered purpose(s).
*The state legislature could revoke a corporation’s charter if it misbehaved.
*The act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts.
*As a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents couldn’t break the law and avoid punishment by claiming they were “just doing their job” when committing crimes but instead could be held criminally liable for violating the law.
*State (not federal) courts heard cases where corporations or their agents were accused of breaking the law or harming the public.
*Directors of the corporation were required to come from among stockholders.
*Corporations had to have their headquarters and meetings in the state where their principal place of business was located.
*Corporation charters were granted for a specific period of time, such as twenty or thirty years (instead of being granted “in perpetuity,” as is now the practice).
*Corporations were prohibited from owning stock in other corporations, to prevent them from extending their power inappropriately.
*Corporations’ real estate holdings were limited to what was necessary to carry out their specific purpose(s).
*Corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect.
*Corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes.
*State legislatures could set the rates that some monopoly corporations could charge for their products or services.

*All corporation records and documents were open to the legislature or the state attorney general.16

Similar laws existed in most other states. It is important to understand that tens of thousands of entrepreneurs did business in the early colonies and continue to do so today without being incorporated—the proverbial butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. To do business in America or most of the world does not require a corporate structure—people can run partnerships, individual proprietorships, or simply manufacture and sell products or offer services without any business structure whatsoever other than keeping track of the money for the Internal Revenue Service.

From the 1500s until the 1880s, corporations were considered the artificial creations of their owners and the state legislatures that authorized them. Because they were artificial legal entities, created only and exclusively by the states and referred to in the law as “artificial persons,” they were subject to control by the people of the state in which they were incorporated, who asserted their will through representative government. In American republican democracy, government’s role is to serve the people and protect them from the predations of both foreign and domestic threats to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. This has historically included control of corporate behavior.

Then the roof started to cave in: In 1819 Chief Justice John Marshall used the power he had given himself and the Supreme Court to alter the states’ power to regulate or dissolve corporations. (Marshall actually restored a corp. charter granted by King George III if you can believe that)

Read my entire link (and only 1 of many available)

When commerce was taken over by large corporate or religious enterprises, however, Madison knew exactly where he stood. In 1817 he wrote, “There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by...corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”

And in a letter to James K. Paulding on March 10, 1827, Madison made absolutely explicit a lifetime of thought on the matter:

Incorporated Companies, with proper limitations and guards, may in particular cases, be useful, but they are at best a necessary evil only. Monopolies and perpetuities are objects of just abhorrence. The former are unjust to the existing, the latter usurpations on the rights of future generations. Is it not strange that the Law which will not permit an individual to bequeath his property to the descendants of his own loins for more than a short and strictly defined term, should authorize an associated few, to entail perpetual and indefeasible appropriations...”

HERE

There is so much more...and look where we are now. Plus the corporation since the 1800's have done nothing like...'raised more people out of poverty by magnitudes than any system.' There was nothing but poverty until FDR created THE NLRB and legally protected collective bargaining which Reagan then set about destroying once and for all.

"vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry" Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Branch Giles 1825.

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." Thomas Jefferson

Congress on February 8, 1791, in which he mustered his reasons for opposing Alexander Hamilton’s proposal to charter a Bank of the United States. Madison began by stressing that corporations, unlike natural persons, had only the exact measure of rights that was conferred upon them by the state in express terms --in other words, they did not have "inalienable rights" which arose under natural law, like the "people of the United States" invoked at the outset of the Constitution. Moreover, Madison soon made clear that he thought
corporations were "powerful machines" that might well do a great deal of mischief if left unguarded.

Thanks for the in depth on that. I do remember some of it but you filled in the spaces. Actually IIRC they were also required to operate in the public interest, like the media used to be before they cut those dogs loose.

Today incorporation seems to have the effect of keeping the private assets of the officers held harmless from lawsuits, plus they are very unlikely to go to jail, but it can happen. Look what happened to KPMG.

Wanna talk about a fucked up government here ? First of all they were prosecuted on laws that did not exist when the supposedly broke them. They also coerced the employees into giving up their attorney/client confidentiality. Apparently the laws do not apply to "them".

Now, corporations run the government. Look at the Monsanto Protection Act for example. If their GMO seeds accidentally spread to your land and grow you have to pay them. Fuck Snooze (Fox News) won the right in court to lie with impunity. They could say the weather will be fine, knowing there will be a terrible storm and not be sueable at all no matter how much property damage or injury or death comes because of them lying for one of their grocery store advertisers to sell more Tbone steaks.

It is not hard to tell for whom they work, ad it isn't us. They work for whoever has the deepest pockets. Thomas Jefferson warned about this shit. Look at all the foreclosures.

The banks CAUSED the housing bubble. The knew they would lose, and that is why they moved the debt to the "to big to fail" guys, to extract money from the government. And the government knew about it and allowed it because they were paid to allow it.

T^T

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DEAD: 125 SCIENTISTS, 75 HIGH-LEVEL BANKERS, & 3 INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS

A Denver banker that supposedly shot himself 8 times in his head and torso with a nail gun, the infectious disease scientist who was stabbed 196 times, 3 investigative journalists who all work in explosive areas die within 24 hours…the list goes on and on.